Tonight, we have doctor Mark Genolette, who is going to talk to us about how to read the Bible. Mark is a professor at Beeson Divinity School. He is also the is it the the lay canon theologian at Cathedral Church of the Advent? It's a really long title. Mark is, he's a good friend.
Joel Brooks:He is a great communicator, and he will do an excellent job of just talking through the Bible and and how we can read this. This is the format for tonight, For those of you who are new to our theological talkbacks, we have a time of theology, that, doctor Ginlette will bring us. And then we will have a break, and we'll have a time in which you could talk back. By talk back, I mean ask questions. Don't just, you know, get up and say, I'd like a few things to say.
Joel Brooks:But we're gonna take a break. About halfway through, you could get some more to drink. We'll have an extended time of q and a. So if you do have some questions, just just be sure to write them down, so you remember them afterwards. And, that's all I have.
Joel Brooks:So let me open this up in prayer, and we will get started. Father God, thank you so much for this time that we could gather together, be with friends, be with the family, of Christ here. Thank you for your for your spirit that unites us. And thank you for Mark coming and speaking to us. We ask that you would use him to speak mightily to us, that you would transform hearts and minds in this place.
Joel Brooks:And we pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.
Collin Hansen:Alright. Well, hello again. I I got to do this with you all last year, and, I mentioned it then. I should probably just mention it again. I mean, it's it's a pinnacle of my existence to be able to talk about Jesus, the Bible, in a bar.
Collin Hansen:I mean, it's it's I I still still have to sort of get my head around this. I'm I'm I will always be a recovering fundamentalist, so this is a, it's part of my part of my DNA. Let me I I I don't have a game plan for tonight. That should really make you nervous. I I I have some talking points.
Collin Hansen:I have some notes from some lectures that I've done. I really want this time to be probably and tomorrow night will look very different. I mean, I'm sure it was by the nature of the beast will. I want there to be a level of repartee, a kind of back and forth between us as you see fit to do that because we're talking about, the Bible, and and I think the Bible, raises a lot of good and critical questions for us. It raises problems for us that as Christians, we have to deal with.
Collin Hansen:I'll be honest with you tonight, I'll answer as best I can. I hope to shape the conversation tonight in a theological framework because everything that I'm gonna say tonight about the Bible is rooted in a Christian confession of faith. Now, I I should start on the outset and just lay that out for you. I I don't I don't know most of you. I don't know what kind of questions you're coming in with theologically.
Collin Hansen:At the advent where I attend, the youth director there, Cameron Cole, and some others hold a group meeting for teenager agnostics and skeptics, that meet at Church Street Coffee in Mountain Brook. They asked me to come to this a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was getting into, with some pretty small smart teenagers. And, and this one guy, I mean, he came loaded for bear, and he he wanted to talk about the Bible. And he wanna talk about the Bible from the moment we got out the gate all the way to the end.
Collin Hansen:And he raised all these kinds of questions, and I I told him, and I'll tell you, I'm gonna be frustrating for you to talk to because the way in which I think about these things theologically is inherently circular. I can't get away from it. In other words, why, is the bible the word of God? Well, the bible is the word of God because I confess that to be true by his own self giving in an act of divine revelation. Herman Bovink, who's one of my favorite theologians from the early 20th century, and I'll quote him some tonight, And if you're looking for a good dog name, Bavinck is not a bad idea.
Collin Hansen:But, Bavinck, he said, when someone asks you, why do you believe that as an article of Christian faith? The answer is because it's in the word of God. And then when they follow that up and they say, and why do you believe that that's a word of God? Why do you believe it's the word of God? Bobbing says, at that point, the Christian has to be more reticent to give an answer.
Collin Hansen:Why? Well, because there's a certain kind of construction of knowledge. How we think, how we order our thoughts, that shaped by our Christian faith. We are shaped in that way. I mean, there's a lot of fascinating work that's going on.
Collin Hansen:I'm already off script, but, there's some fascinating work that's been, that's going on right now where there's a lot of talk. Maybe some of you have read some of the work by this, Calvinist reformed guy from Michigan named James k a Smith. I don't know if any of you've read Smith's work, but he's doing a lot to talk about the role that liturgy or worship or embodiment plays with the way in which we think and know and come to understand the world. We tend to think that maybe we can just kind of engage ideas on this abstract plane and we can't do that. We're shaped by liturgies.
Collin Hansen:We're embodied people. You are shaped, you redeemer community church people who go to your church every Sunday, which I assume is the majority of you. You are shaped in more ways than you know in your understanding of the faith and the Bible and Christianity, the gospel by what you're doing on Sunday, even by standing up and singing together, and sitting down, and worshiping together, and kneeling, and praying together. All of this embodied meant existence that we have together shapes the way in which we know. And I was telling this teenage boy, and he is just getting so frustrated with me and I was getting frustrated with me too.
Collin Hansen:I guess. I was like, listen, I'm working within a certain construction of knowledge that shaped by an interior commitment to faith. I don't, I'm not going to try to claim neutrality. I'm not going to attempt to even b s you with a little neutrality. I can't do that because I want you to know from the beginning that my understanding of the Bible, my understanding of God, my understanding of the gospel are all shaped in an interpenetrating communication, the one with the other.
Collin Hansen:They're all shaped by a confession of faith. That goes all the way back to a guy named Anselm, who was borrowing this from Augustine, who was borrowing it from the Bible. And that is faith always precedes understanding. You know, this was the lie or not necessarily the lie, because I have a lot of time for modernity. Modernity gave us a lot of gifts that we need to be thankful for in our modern era.
Collin Hansen:I don't want to deny that. But one of the ugly grandchildren of modernity born out of the 17th century and into the 18th century was this notion that what we need to do is bracket off our belief. We need to set it aside, build a case on the base basis of neutral evidence, and from that neutral evidence, then we can let faith come in on the back end because now it's reasonable. And frankly, I'm not sure what else to call that now, and I had the privilege of hindsight. But from our our vantage point now, I don't know what else to call that but epistemic or mental or cognitive idolatry.
Collin Hansen:It's what it is. And because faith shapes the way in which we understand, faith precedes knowledge. It's on the front end. I don't set it to the side in order to construct some sort of neutral basis by which everyone can come to the table of evidence and everyone can then agree and go away by whichever best arguments win. Right?
Collin Hansen:I I I'm I so if if you think in that way, you're gonna hate tonight. Alright? So just a good warning. I did wanna read something to you before we hop in. I guess we're in.
Collin Hansen:But I wanted to read Psalm 19, because I think Psalm 19 it's one of the better places to start in a conversation about the Bible. Alright. So Psalm 19, can I read this to you? The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, night to night declares knowledge.
Collin Hansen:There is no speech, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard yet their voice go out, goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. And the heavens, he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy. What a beautiful description, right? You know, like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Collin Hansen:It's rising. It's from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them and nothing is hid from its heat. They divide my clothes. Oops. I've turned the page.
Collin Hansen:If I the they they're not dividing my clothes. That was a wrong that was a weird jump. And nothing is hid from its heat. Think about that. Alright.
Collin Hansen:So in those first six verses of Psalm 19, I'm glad you're tracking that. In the the first, six verses of Psalm 19, we have a classic expression of what Christian theologians have typically called general revelation. The fact that the heavens declared the glory of God. The heavens and the firmament, the sun meeting, its bridegroom and the canopy of the sky. I mean, what a gorgeous description in the Bible.
Collin Hansen:The Bible is rich with this kind of imagery. Now that all of that just shouts to us that that God is and that God overwhelms us with his beauty. Now it's a claim about what we might call, I guess, we wanna use inflated language, the metaphysics of engaging the material in the created world. Now one of the better exposes that I had of this, or at least illustrations of this, that came to me recently was reading a Donna Tartt's novel, The Goldfinch. I won the Pulitzer 2 years ago.
Collin Hansen:Anybody worked their way through that beastly tome of a book? It was a good one. And it's all about this painting about the goldfish, but at the end, there's this really deep conversation about painting and music and art, and it was a conversation about metaphysics. It was a conversation about God and otherness and how we know, and he describes this painting. This old uncle figure described it to this young man.
Collin Hansen:He says, you know what it's like when you go into an art gallery and you see a painting and you know that that painting is having an encounter with you as if something beyond the painting is whispering to you. Hey, you. I'm talking to you. In the late 19th century, there was a German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer, who actually, I have a lot of time for this guy bald head Pictures of him are awesome. Massive white land, the lamb chops or whatever those things are called.
Collin Hansen:He looks incredibly doleful, unhappy. He was an angry philosopher, who said that ethics is built on the back of charity and kindness. And then he went on to say in his private correspondence, even though I'm not charitable and I hate everybody, that's how it's supposed to be. He was, he was a rough guy. But Schopenhauer talked about life and he raised the classic question, is life worth living?
Collin Hansen:And his response to that, unlike the Greek tradition, the stoics and the Epicureans, Schopenhauer said, actually, life is not worth living because life is suffering, and this is the suffering that we live in. But what what is it Schopenhauer? Some of you can I'm sympathetic to this by the way, and you will be too, absent a Christian worldview. We live in the suffering that that live between the continuum of desire, the suffering that comes from wanting something that we don't have, yearning for something that's not ours. That's an act of suffering.
Collin Hansen:And then the other act of suffering is the boredom that comes along with getting what it is you desired. What we what I call with my 4 kids, you know, Christmas Eve depression. Right? Or Christmas night depression. Well, I guess that's it.
Collin Hansen:Right? All the funds over. Now we're right. We enter the boredom. And and Schopenhauer was very clear to say, you cannot escape that continuum of existence.
Collin Hansen:Like, oh, goodness. That's let's go to Vegas and call it all off. Right? But he did say there is one area of human existence where that is suspended, and it's when you have an encounter with music. In the encounter with in the encounter with something that's aesthetically rich with heat with reading good prose, with engaging art, with seeing a sunset, that there's something that comes from beyond that says to you, hey, you talking to you.
Collin Hansen:And Calvin, and by you all have if you've heard me before, you know that I'm a big John Calvin fan, and I hope that doesn't set your teeth on edge. I really like Calvin, dyspeptic as he was, but I like Calvin. And Calvin would have affirmed all of that. He would have suggest the heavens, they declare the glory of God. The engagement with the beauty of this world, the engagement with art, which is an act of subcreation and light of the creator, all of that just whispers to us about the grandeur of God.
Collin Hansen:But Calvin would go on to say, and all of that revelation that God gives you in the general natural order is just enough to damn you. It's not enough to save you. It's just enough to make you culpable, not enough to give you redemption. I say this to students at Beeson all the time. You know, the gap between proof and persuasion is an infinite gap.
Collin Hansen:Right? To move from being an agnostic to a theist, and now I believe there is a God out there is a far cry from a Christian confession of faith that says, oh, and by the way, that God is named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who's revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth. That's a far cry from saying, I believe there's some divine mover out there. So Calvin was quick to say that's not enough, and that's where the psalmist goes to. Right?
Collin Hansen:You have the beauty of the natural world, but there's more. Verse 7, the law of the Lord is perfect. I don't think we have a better description of the scriptures anywhere in the Bible than right here. It's beautiful. The law of the Lord, it's perfect.
Collin Hansen:What does it do? It revives the soul. The decrees of the lord, they're sure you can rest on them. They make wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right.
Collin Hansen:They rejoice the heart. The commandment of the Lord is clear. It enlightens the eyes. And the fear of the Lord is pure. It endures forever.
Collin Hansen:The ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold. They're sweeter than the honey, even the drippings of a honeycomb. What a description of the beauty and the power of the word of the Lord. There's a lot to talk about here.
Collin Hansen:The law of the Lord, which don't think strictly do's and don'ts when you hear that word law. Right? Torah. It's the instruction of God. It's God speaking to you and talking to you from the scriptures about all of life.
Collin Hansen:The law of the Lord, it's perfect and it's refreshing of the soul. And then he goes on to use that beautiful image of the honeycomb, which I don't know if you know anything about honey. I'm just starting to read up on this. It's fascinating. My brother-in-law keeps honeybees in South Carolina and just send us a big quart jar of his honey.
Collin Hansen:I mean, what an incredible thing honey is. You stick your hand in it, you taste it. It's sweet. It's rich. Apparently, it never goes bad.
Collin Hansen:You'll have to test that out before I will, but never goes bad, right? And this is the description of the word of the Lord. It's perfect. So let's talk about the Bible. Right?
Collin Hansen:The Bible. You realize that the Bible comes to you in a way that's creaturely and human from the beginning to the end. Now, this is worth sort of stepping back and reflecting on because there's something that we have to wrestle with tonight, and this is to me a very big question that we have to answer before we move into the how do we read the Bible question? The pragmatic question. The first question that I think we have to ask is, what is the Bible?
Collin Hansen:What is this thing? What what what's our confession of faith about what the Bible is and what the Bible does? The bible is the word of God. The word of God. Now, some of you are linguists here, and you like language, you fiddle with words, and you're really good with words.
Collin Hansen:And you know, those of you who've taken maybe some foreign languages, I don't know about you, but for me, I didn't really learn English till I was forced to to learn another language. I mean, that was when it's sort of I I took Greek in undergrad, and once I took Greek in undergrad, then I'm like, oh, there's a construction that we don't really talk about very much in English, but in most foreign languages, Indo European languages, German, even you have like Italian. They they they talk about what's called a genitive. It's that of construction. The house of the king, the word of God.
Collin Hansen:And if any of you've done language, and I and you know that some of you beaceny people who are here go where I go, and you know learning Greek and Hebrew, if you think, by the way, that that's the blue pill in the matrix that's gonna solve all your bible problems, right, well, you know, I've got really bad news for you. Learning the biblical languages only creates more interpretive problems. Right? Because now you know their options. And this is one of those issues with that particular phrase, the word of God.
Collin Hansen:It can be understood in multiple ways. The word that has its source in God. That's right. The word whose content is about God. That's a fair way of understanding that construction.
Collin Hansen:But the basis of all genitives, word of God, that the basis of all of them, what they all have in some element in the connotative level is possession. The word of God. It's God's word. I wanna say that on the front end because I want the force of that, and I know all of you know this. But the force of that has to sit on us.
Collin Hansen:It's God's word. It's his. He dispenses with it as he wills. And because we confess the word of God to be God's word, that shapes the way in which we come at this thing with all of its complexity and profundity. Now, I don't know how many of you have made any kind of front end of the year bible reading commitments.
Collin Hansen:Right? God bless you if you've done that. Right? I've I've tried many times and failed many times. Right?
Collin Hansen:Because you get out of the gate. Genesis is pretty hot. That's good stuff. Right? People killing each other.
Collin Hansen:Angels are sleeping with young women. I mean, it's it's it's wild. I mean, this thing's NC 17. This is good stuff. You get into Exodus.
Collin Hansen:That's pretty good too. A lot going on there. They start talking about the construction of the tabernacle and the details there. A little bit of a snoozer. Then you get to, Leviticus and you're out.
Collin Hansen:Right? It's over. I'm going back to the Psalms. I know I can find a home there. Right?
Collin Hansen:So the the bible doesn't necessarily come to us in the ways in which we wish it wished it were packaged. I mean, I'm you know what? I get to leave tonight, so I hope it'll cause problems for you. You can ask me a question about this, but the Bible doesn't necessarily come to us in the way that we want it to be packaged. Jerome, one of the early church fathers who was one of the first real scholars of Hebrew in the Old Testament as a Christian, Jerome said, I left the beauty of Cicero's Latin for the barbarity of the Hebrew language.
Collin Hansen:You know what he was saying? He was saying when you compare the prose and the elevated style of Cicero's rhetoric, and compare that to Deuteronomy or Kings, or Ezra, the bible doesn't even come close from a rhetorical standpoint to the elevated and the quality of of, of Cicero's prose. And he went on to say, and my leaving Cicero to follow in the footsteps of the Hebrew Bible was part of my leaving everything to follow Jesus. Oh, I would I I tell the students at Beeson, when you leave learn Hebrew at Beeson, you should get spiritual formation credit because this is an act of Christian. This is an act of Christian self denial.
Collin Hansen:You're leaving everything to follow Jesus and you're learning Hebrew. And it's rough. I mean, this is one of the things too. I'm I'm gonna problem my ties all this and then wrap it up in a nice bow. But, I mean, one of the issues that's been I I I don't know if I even have my mind completely around it.
Collin Hansen:But in his book on translation theory, George Steiner, who taught at Cambridge for years, one of the greatest literary theorists and critics of our time. George Steiner said, we've got a real problem that needs to be wrestled with when you compare the Psalms of the Old Testament to the King James version translation of it. And he presses into that. And by the way, you know, I grew up in a King James kinda world and then rebelled against it because I wanted to kinda move on to cooler pastures and the the NASB or the new new and accurate version, the NIV or that was a little joke. I like the NIV.
Collin Hansen:You know, so some sort of modern translation. But as I've gotten older, you know, I I find myself kinda going back to the King James. It's this Elizabethan English. You know, who's the fellow Ezra Pound? Maybe I'm getting the name wrong, but some literary theorists said that basically, the English language was preserved and given a standard because of the King James version in the book of common prayer.
Collin Hansen:It's incredible. But here's the problem. The King James version is better than the original. It's more beautiful. It's more fluent.
Collin Hansen:I mean, something about Hebrew poetry is it comes at you in a kinda machine gun staccato way. The Lord, my shepherd is I mean, it's like Yoda. Lord, my shepherd is. What? I will not.
Collin Hansen:Right? I mean, like, come on. You're just rough. Alright. And and then here comes, you know, Elizabethan translators like Lancelot Andrews, and the Lord is my shepherd.
Collin Hansen:I shall not want me. Who can better that? You can't. It's beautiful. Right?
Collin Hansen:So this is the reality that we we face recognizing on the confessional, and number 1, the Bible is God's word. The Bible does what the Bible does in the life of the church because God has deemed it to be so. I'm not gonna make a kind of naturalist argument to say, the reason why the Bible is God's word is because it's the best literature, because it's the Bible. We recognize the Bible as God's word in the face of the scandal of its creaturely character. It is a creaturely document written by human beings from as one of my colleagues would say, from Genesis all the way to the maps.
Collin Hansen:Right? All of it. Right? So you raise questions like, well, which part of the Bible's culture and which part is not? The answer, all of it is because it's written by people in time.
Collin Hansen:Matter of fact, the leading proponent, I would say, one of the clearer thinkers in the 20th century on the doctrine of inspiration, that is the bible is breathed out by God. It was a fellow that taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in its heyday named Brent Benjamin Breckridge Warfield. I think is it Breck Breckeridge? B b Warfield. Right?
Collin Hansen:And Warfield furthered a notion of inspiration that we properly call organic inspiration. It's not dictation theories of inspiration. It's an organic model. What does that mean? That means that God uses the personalities of the authors and does not suspend their humanity or their creatureliness when he is giving them his word to write down and communicate.
Collin Hansen:In other words, God uses the personality and the learning of a Moses, of a David, of a Paul, of an Ezra, of an Isaiah, of a David, of an ASAP, of a Peter, of a Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And they come to us in these multi perspectival ways with a different stamp on each character of the literature because God doesn't suspend the creaturely character of the Bible in an effort to move humanity out of the way. So the Bible is fully the word of God. We confess that as a confession of our belief, but it's also fully creaturely, which means that we learn Hebrew and Greek and languages, and we wrestle with what what exactly is a cow of the Sean and what's the significance of Song of Solomon talking about a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley in that day? What's the significance of?
Collin Hansen:And the list goes on and on and on. Why? Because the Bible is born out of time and space and creaturely realities and creaturely personalities. This is where a doctrine, a Christian doctrine, to me, has been hugely helpful, and that is the notion of sanctification. Now, this is not a typical use or or doctrine that's used in the conversation about the Bible, but I have found it to be frankly, life giving.
Collin Hansen:When we talk about sanctification in the life of the church, we're typically talking about a Christian's position and holiness in Jesus. Secondly, we're talking about a progressive sort of growth of holiness in the Christian life. K? But when we apply the doctrine of sanctification to the Bible, what we're confessing is that God took human creaturely efforts, creaturely mediums of quill and vellum, or chisel and clay tablet, or papyri and pin, that he took these human instruments and these human authors, and he set them apart. He sanctified them.
Collin Hansen:He, ordained that their work would be what he would take unto himself and use as the life giving means by which God would communicate his very self to his people for the duration of the life of God's people in this world. You gotta let the weight of that sit on you. In other words, the efforts that Peter and David and Matthew put into writing a document, Luke tells us very clearly in the first chapter of Luke that he's looking at sources and doing research and interviewing people. Many of you may have read Richard Bauchamps book from a few years back called Jesus and the eyewitnesses. I mean, Luke strains to tell us, Hey, by the way, I've interviewed people about this Eye witnesses who and those Luke's doing his homework.
Collin Hansen:And God uses these creaturely activities and sanctifies them. He sets them apart as the unique means by which he will communicate himself to us. Now, why is this important? It's important because we want to affirm the creaturely character of the Bible, and we want to equally affirm, and I would even say, more so affirm, that God uses these creaturely means to communicate his very word, and that those are not antithetical the one to the other. They're not.
Collin Hansen:What does it say in Peter? The scriptures came to us by the Holy Spirit moving upon men as they were propelled and compelled by the Holy Spirit to write what it is that they wrote. And they did that in efforts of and think about all the genres of Bible. I mean, the Bible is a wild book, isn't it? You've got story.
Collin Hansen:By the way, I know that we're in a kinda day and age where telling your story and living into the narrative, I mean, this is all very sexy talk these days. What's your story? And the the Bible's one big narrative. I mean, you got story all over the place. It's probably the dominant genre of the Bible.
Collin Hansen:You've got story. You've got didactic literature like Paul working through a tight logical argument. Romans chapter 9 into chapter 10, into chapter 11, therefore chapter 12, and you better get your diagrams out and start working through that. I mean, even Peter said, you read that Paul? He's hard to understand.
Collin Hansen:Right? Now so you got didactic literature. You've got the stories of the gospels. You have prophetic literature. You have law.
Collin Hansen:You have wisdom. You have counter wisdom like the book of job and Ecclesiastes. You have stories about women like Ruth and Esther, and you've got poetry in the Bible. I mean, for you, and I'm kind of a cognitive left brainy kind of person. But few artists out there, I mean, you've kind of just appreciate that the Bible comes to you with poetry in it.
Collin Hansen:Beautiful poetry. So in all of these various mediums and genres, God has sanctified these human productions as the instrument, the unique instrument by which he is going to give himself to the church. And that's why whenever we talk about the Bible, we have to talk about God and who God is. We can't talk about the Bible in an abstract way. We can't heist the Bible up and talk about it, divorce from all of these other commitments of Christian faith that we have around our talk about the Bible.
Collin Hansen:What are some of our Christian confessions of faith? What we believe to be true about the gospel that shapes our engagement with the Bible, our understanding of the Bible. Well, number 1, we believe that God is triune. We believe that God is father, son, and Holy Spirit, and an eternal life of inter Trinitarian communication and love and self giving to one another. There was no need.
Collin Hansen:There was no necessity outside the life of God by which God had to do anything. Didn't need me either. But in an act of self giving where God's inner life of infinite and beautiful love, communicative love, self sustaining love, in an act of self giving, God turns that love outward. And when he turns outward, he creates the world, probably creating space by removing himself so the world could be, but he creates the world, and then he sets himself to redeem that world. And God's own eternal conversation, creation and redemption flow out as acts of love.
Collin Hansen:And I've got to talk about the Bible in the context of that particular God. Who is God? God's a God who says, I'm gonna turn my love outward, and you're gonna understand who I am, my true character, my true identity when I give myself to you. Well, God, how do you give yourself to us? I give myself to you in creation, and I give myself to you in redemption.
Collin Hansen:Flip sides of an equally important coin. I give myself to you in both of those. They're acts of grace, both creation and redemption. And God's giving us his word in the bible. This 66 chapter book that we carry around, leather bound, God giving himself to us in this creaturely medium, is an attestation that he loves us, and that he wants to redeem us, and that he's for us, and that from the creation of the world and even into the very eternal life of God, he's a God who said, I'm going to redeem and reconcile the world.
Collin Hansen:And guess what? When God speaks, the world shows up. And when God speaks by the power of his word through the active agency of the Holy Spirit, when he does that, people come to know him. People get redeemed. So I've gotta talk about the Bible in the context of my belief and confession about who God is.
Collin Hansen:I've gotta talk about the Bible and my confession about the gospel and salvation and what it means to be a Christian, turning to Jesus and recognizing that God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, has given himself to humanity by that sandaled figure who kicked up dust in the 1st century world. Because the Bible is the word of God because the Bible testifies to him, that witnesses to him. Do you realize this right about the character of the Bible? The Bible's not meant to be self referential. The Bible's not meant to curve in on itself.
Collin Hansen:The Bible is the bony finger of Isaiah and David and Moses and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and especially John the Baptist. The Bible is the bony finger of the prophet saying, look away and see Jesus. See God. That's what the Bible is about. So I can't talk about the Bible in a way that abstracts it from my understanding about who God is.
Collin Hansen:And I wanna say one more thing about this because, I've swallowed the reformed pill. Okay? And I've gotta say this. The Bible is also operative in the life of the church by the active agency of the Holy Spirit. That is earth tectonic plates shifting kind of statement.
Collin Hansen:Because what that means in effect is and this goes all the way back to Calvin. It goes all the way back to Gus, and I believe it goes all the way back to the Bible. Is black words on a white page. It's the Holy Spirit and his life of teaching. And you know that's the property of the Holy Spirit and the life of the church, the church, you all, Redeemer Community Church, you're the social organism by which the Holy Spirit teaches in the school of faith.
Collin Hansen:You realize that right? Now I need to be careful here because, you know, there's an old joke about this. Lutherans understand the church to be a hospital for sinners. Reformed Presbyterian Calvinist types, they tend to understand the church as, an institute for doctrine, and, Episcopalians didn't understand the church as a country club. That's a that's a blow joke on my own people.
Collin Hansen:Bad. It hurts, but it's a lot of truth. So I I don't wanna sort of reduce reduce this. Just cut that out Heine. Whoever is editing this.
Collin Hansen:I don't know if these would be cut out. That was half a beer talking. So, but the the church is the social organism by which the Holy Spirit does his teaching work, his teaching office, where the Holy Spirit communicates to us the presence of Jesus. I want you to think about that when you're reading the Bible alone, individually. I want you to think about that when you come in here, Joel or Dwight or whoever else is preaching.
Collin Hansen:I want you to have that conception of the word of God that through these human conduits, which are submitting themselves to this document called the Bible, that God has given himself to us in a promise that he will not leave us without his son. I mean, you realize, right, and you know we just went through Lent and Holy Week, and I call that CNN Jesus Conversations 101. Right? You just turn on the Discovery Channel, CNN, History Channel, all these Jesus documentaries, and and what's the big problem? Well, the big problem is the 1st century world, the ancient near eastern world, so different than our world.
Collin Hansen:Gotta kinda climb back in there and start breathing the falafel of the 1st century world to make sense of anything that Jesus had to say. I mean, you've gotta enter into that world and smell leather and cheap and stuff, right? I think what the church has said from its inception, the best of the Christian tradition has said, the problem with the Bible is never that it's an ancient document. That's not its problem. Why?
Collin Hansen:Because that gap between the 1st century world or the 8th century BC world or the 10th century BC world, That gap is filled by the promised presence of Jesus via the teaching life of the Holy Spirit. I've got to have a robust doctrine of the Trinity whenever I talk about the Bible, or else all I get all I can do is get lost in the cultural morass that is the bible. I've got to talk about it from the standpoint of God's own self self giving. What time is it? Oh, yeah.
Collin Hansen:I have, 5 minutes. Sir, you can't leave. That's my father. I got his. Oh, okay.
Collin Hansen:I shouldn't have done that. So what am what am I gonna say for the remainder of the timer? This is what I say because you asked me to come here in the last in the to talk about how to read the Bible. I haven't talked about that at all. I've talked about what the Bible is, but well, I'm happy to talk about the other part too.
Collin Hansen:But why did I wanna say all that? Because I think our instinct, especially in the far side of modernity, is to think that our reading strategies of the Bible are primarily intellectual problems to be solved. In other words, how am I gonna read the Bible rightly? How am I gonna avoid making mistakes with it? And I think if left to our own instincts, our response would be, well, go to Beeson, or, you know, take every bible study possible.
Collin Hansen:And by the way, I hope you do all those. So I hope you get the nuance that I'm coming out this way. But I think we tend to lead in that conversation, and then the answer to the how do I read the bible question with methodological answers. And the best of the Christian tradition has never led that way. Never.
Collin Hansen:In fact, the best of the Christian tradition has responded to that kind of question by saying, well, the way in which you read the bible and avoid reading it in error I come with a posture that shaped by my confession about what this thing actually is, all that stuff we've been talking about. Why? Because the bible understands that it has implied readers. It assumes a certain kind of reader. Now I know the Bible studied in English departments all over America as, you know, introduction to the Bible is literature.
Collin Hansen:And I know that there are religion departments all over America that study the Bible as a kind as a as a species of either Greco Roman into antiquity or the ancient news and world, and let all all of them have at it. I mean, that is fine, and I can learn from what they had to say. But the Christian commitment and Christian confession says, no, but I'm coming to the bible with a certain understanding of what God means to do with his word by an act of self giving and acts of redemption and salvation. And because that's the case, I've got to come to the Bible in such a way that the Bible assumes I'll be the reader that it's anticipating. It wants certain kinds of readers.
Collin Hansen:What kinds of readers? Saint Augustine. And if you want a good book to read over the summer, and I I I'm not joking here. I encourage you. Take up this challenge on the beach, right after you read I don't know.
Collin Hansen:Whatever. Saint Augustine's on Christian doctrine. It's not an easy read, k, but it's a small read. And saying that Guston raises this this question all the way back in the late 4th and early 5th century. How do you read the Bible?
Collin Hansen:He doesn't talk about methodology at one turn at this point in his argument. He says, you read the Bible in an act of fear, which shaped by love, which leads to piety. And what does he mean by that? What do you mean fear, Augustine? What he means by that is, I come to the Bible with an attitude of humility, a posture of humility, recognizing the the true source of this diverse canon of scripture.
Collin Hansen:The true source is God, and I come with a posture of humility saying, and this is right. This is almost a verbatim quote from Augustine, saying that whatever God has to say in this word, even in its difficult and least assimilable parts, is more important than the best thing that I could ever construct with my own thoughts and ideas. When I come to the Bible that way, and I submit my intellect and my will and my emotions to it, and open myself up to God's word, the searching, scrutinizing power of God's word to say, do with me as you will. Shape your church in light of this word, in light of your own self giving. That is true fear.
Collin Hansen:That is true piety. That is true love, and Saint Augustine would say, and that is a true reading strategy. And do you know who stands up in the tradition and applauds Augustine there? And some Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Kramer, and the list goes on. You don't have to look far within the best of the Western Christian tradition to find all of them saying a very similar thing that comes right out of the Augustine interpretive manual.
Collin Hansen:We read the Bible in acts of humility and independence on the Holy Spirit to do his work. Now, I like Karl Barth. I know he's controversial, but I like him. Karl Barth was working within this Augustinian tradition as well, 20th century Swiss theologian. And Karl Barth and his massive tome of a work called the Church Dogmatics, volume 1, part 2.
Collin Hansen:He says, because all of this is true he says this in multiple places. I have quotes, but I won't read them. Because it's true, The most important character trait, the most important practical outcome that comes from, number 1, our confession about what the Bible is. Number 2, our understanding of the Bible and God's own redemptive purposes. Number 3, our understanding that without the Holy Spirit, there is no Bible operative in the life of the church.
Collin Hansen:All of that leads to one necessary exegetical or interpretive outcome, namely prayer. Like, of course. Right? And we say that. Yeah.
Collin Hansen:Pray. Where was everything? Right? Where are my books? Right?
Collin Hansen:Pray. And and, you know, it's prayer. In fact, Barth goes on the offensive and he says, not only is prayer the most effective and the most necessary practical tool that one takes to the study of the Bible, it's teaching, it's preaching, it's personal study. Not only is prayer the most important practical tool, it's the only tool that will keep you from acts of disobedience. He goes on the offensive there.
Collin Hansen:You wanna be an obedient reader of the Bible? You wanna avoid disobedience in your reading of the Bible? Bart says, you pray from beginning to the end. The bible's wild and the bible's difficult. There are dragons in the bible, dark allies in the Bible, difficult questions, questions that I won't pretend to be able to answer all of them on this side of the eternity, and you won't either.
Collin Hansen:Bonafide issues that we have to wrestle with. But I think this particular kind of confession of faith regarding what the Bible is, that shapes again a reading strategy. A strategy that's shaped by fear, piety, love of God, humility, which leads to acts of dependence, which are most marked by the posture of prayer and the study of the bible. I think that's a good way to kinda get out of the gate. Alright?
Collin Hansen:Break time? Yes.
Joel Brooks:I'm going to get things going with with the first question, if that's alright, because I know it's a question that a number of you have come up to me over the years and have asked. The question is this. How do we know which parts of the Bible we are still supposed to obey? So when we're reading through scripture and we come to things like, you're not supposed to eat shellfish. Are we not supposed to eat shellfish?
Joel Brooks:Or you're supposed to keep the year of Jubilee and every 50 years sell back all of your possessions and give it to whoever? What are the parts of the Bible that we let go of? And what are the parts of the Bible that we are supposed to hold fast to and say this is still for today that we are still to obey. Does that make sense?
Collin Hansen:Sure. Sure. And do I need to repeat that question? I think that was good. Okay.
Collin Hansen:Good. That's a hard one. And and it's and it's a question that the Christian tradition itself has wrestled with and will continue to wrestle with and has provided different answers for. For example, you know, none none of the men here, except for maybe housing, I don't know, were worried about rounding off the corners of your beard, you know, before you came in, or, you know, a little smoked mullet. I'm happy to eat some of those sort of, you know, scavenger fish or whatever.
Collin Hansen:And so and sauce barbecue, I mean, Lord help us. Right? We want a little pork. So the the the ways in which the the reform tradition has answered that question is to make a distinction in, the old testament law between civil, ceremonial, and moral aspects of the law. And the ceremonial aspects, which have to do with a lot of the weird stuff that we read in the bible, like, you know, when a woman's during her time of the month, she's not to come to worship, or and and by the way, the best of bible scholars, really conservative or liberal, are very careful now not to give some sort of natural account of why those laws matter.
Collin Hansen:In other words, some some of those laws are frankly given in the old testament just because Israel is supposed to be distinct. Not necessarily because pork is inherently bad for you, or shrimp, you know, can make your left toe fall off. I mean, it's there's no that that that kind of logic is not at work. It's about God making his people distinct. You know, so you'll read some of these books about, you know, the bible's diet and those kind of I mean, I'd just be very careful about that kind of thing because there's not always a natural move between a certain law and a rationalized account for why that law was there.
Collin Hansen:So, you know, the moral laws, the 10 commandments, and and certain other aspects of law. Then the problem with that nice division between civil, ceremonial, and moral is that the law in the Pentateuch, the 5 books of Moses, it it doesn't come to us that way. It comes to us with civil, ceremonial, and moral aspects all interweaving and interpenetrating the one with the other. So that I think, you know, really instead of giving a kind of hard and fast abstract principle on how to answer that question, because the devil on this one lingers in the generalities, you kinda have to wrestle with each one on its own individual terms. For example, and you all know this story in acts 15, you have the Jerusalem council.
Collin Hansen:And now you have all these gentile Gentiles were becoming Christians, and at that time, Christians were still understood as a species of Judaism. It was a Jewish faith. And so here, you have all these Gentiles that are becoming Christians, and there, this created all kinds of problems in the early church. So they had a council in Jerusalem. James, the brother of Jesus, sat as the kind of head of the senate, and and they wrestled with, well, what laws apply to the gentiles?
Collin Hansen:Do you remember the 3 laws that they it's kind of like, why those? Yeah. What what laws? You had, don't eat blood, avoid, sexual immorality, and don't murder. Don't shed blood.
Collin Hansen:And you think, well, those aren't too bad, and but why those 3? And the answer is, those 3 were chosen because in Leviticus 17 to 19, those were the laws that were applied to the alien sojourner in the land. So in other words, here you have the gentile I mean, the Jewish Christians at Jerusalem wrestling through the implications of the law, even the ceremonial law, for converted Christians. And how do they do that? They let Leviticus shape the conversation.
Collin Hansen:For all of our, you know, frustration with Paul and the law, how does Paul view the law? You have some weird stuff going on Corinthians. Right? I mean, you have a man that's sleeping with his stepmother. That's bad.
Collin Hansen:You've got another a christian taking another christian to court. Not great. Lots of divorce going on. Problems with idolatry when it comes to should we eat meat that's given to idols or not. And Paul's dealing with all these pastoral issues.
Collin Hansen:He's like, well, Paul, how did you deal with them? Some very fine work has been done over the past decade, maybe 15 years to show. You know how Paul dealt with them? By thinking through the implications of the book of Deuteronomy and applying the law, Deuteronomy, and the way in which Deuteronomy dealt with these issues to the particular localized situation that Paul was dealing with. So one.
Collin Hansen:But you know, the bible doesn't give you a neat and tidy picture really of anything. It demands interpretive work in the life of the church to think through a host And a lot of people disagree on how they come to terms with that. How about bible verses on how on the methodology of raising your kids. I got 4 kids. They're all Philistines.
Collin Hansen:Well, 3 of them are. My little girl's perfect, but the 3 boys are I mean, it's they're Philistines to the core. You know what I mean? Where where does the bible give me the answer to should I let her cry it out or not? Right?
Collin Hansen:It doesn't. It doesn't. The Bible what's the Bible's answer to the question of whether or not a Christian can be involved in acts of warfare and killing? It does I mean, it's complicated. I mean, I hope and I don't mean that to sound like a kinda get out of jail free card.
Collin Hansen:I'm just saying the Christian tradition has to wrestle with the Bible because the Bible doesn't come to you in a neat and tidy package. It comes to you in all those various genres, and that's where the hard work in the life of the church in the community of God's people, why you have to wrestle with these things. Now I will say, again, just might as well stick my foot right in the fire on this. It is an interest given where we are today in the life of the church, and I'm in the Episcopal church, so I'm in the deep end of the mess on all this. It is interesting that the one area where the Bible speaks without clearing its throat and is UNIVICAL.
Collin Hansen:And you can press back on me, and I know some of you here will want to. Now, but the one area where the Bible is UNIVICAL is in same sex practice. I mean, that's one area where the Bible does not clear its throat in any way. That's a pretty clear demarcation that the bible speaks univocally on that matter. But what about women's ordination?
Collin Hansen:Should women be ministers in your church? I think your church says no to that. My church says yes to that. That's a complicated issue. What about and the list goes on.
Collin Hansen:So the point is, I think, again, this one I wanna go back to my first lecture. The most important part and I tell this to my students. The most important character trait of readers of God's word, whether they are clergy or laity, is not accuracy. It's responsibility. Because your accuracy and your understanding of certain texts and your understanding of certain ethical issues might change over time as you continue to yourself to a hearing of God's word, and all of its complexity and profundity.
Collin Hansen:But it's responsibility to be responsible with what you have as an act of service before before the lord. That's really important. And that's that humility of saying, I'm gonna submit to the Bible and what the bible claims even where it's uncomfortable. Because that's the posture of the piety and the applied reader of the Bible. You remember Mark Twain's famous line?
Collin Hansen:I love this line from Twain. Twain said, it's not the parts of the Bible that I don't get that bother me. It's the parts that I understand that bother me. That's that's the scandal of the Bible for the Christian. It's the parts that we understand.
Collin Hansen:Do we really are we really willing to submit to the parts that we get? Right? I'm happy to debate the parts that are hard. But what about the parts that we get? Right?
Collin Hansen:We understand. That's that's the challenge, I think. Hey. Oh, thanks.
Speaker 3:Hi. If you wouldn't mind, would you mind just talking a little bit about the Apocrypha and why, kinda during the Protestant reformation, it was, issued from the canon?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Good question. This goes back to an early debate find my email address on Beeson website, I'm I'm just about to do I've got an article coming out on this issue. I I find it completely fascinating. It's fascinating.
Collin Hansen:Because it has to do with the role of the septuagen in the life of the church. And the septuagen was the Greek translation of the bible that was produced in the 2nd century BC, and, really became, in effect, the Christian Bible, probably very early in the life of the church. Why? Well, because it was in Greek. Very few people read Hebrew, and the scope of the Hebrew canon was limited to the books that we know in your standard sort of English bibles, but the Septuagint kind of had a tradition of growth over time that included these these so called deuterocanonical or or apocryphal books like Maccabees or Tobit or Judith or Susan and the Dragon and, you know, some some of these, fascinating stories.
Collin Hansen:And what people don't realize is the question about what books are in or out, what books are canonical or not, which have a long shelf life in the life of the church and the synagogue. Well, the synagogue raised the question or they framed it this way, what book solely the hands? What books make the hands impure so that you have to go wash hands before you handle it handle it again? Is Esther canonical or not? The rabbis debated that.
Collin Hansen:Why? Well, Esther doesn't mention God once. And then in the church, you have questions that come with the new testament, like Shepherd of Hermas, 2nd Peter, Revelation. So you had a distinction that was made in the early church between what was called homologumina and antilogumina. Homologumina were the books that everyone agreed on.
Collin Hansen:Antilagumina were books that were disputed, and they were kind of on the periphery. Revelation, 2nd Peter, James even. Right? So this has had a long shelf life. The Catholic church and the Roman Catholic tradition, they affirm tradition in a way that protestants are a little bit more circumspect about.
Collin Hansen:And this this goes all the way back to a debate between Saint Augustine and Jerome in the late 4th 4th century and early 5th century. Jerome said the Hebrew canon should be the authoritative canon, and Augustine said on the basis of inspiration and the basis of tradition, the Septuagint, which included these apocryphal books, that should be the Christian Bible, and that has created a long debate in the life of the church. And by the way, it's a debate that exists to this day. Now I would say not a ton rides on it from a certain doctrinal perspective because now, I don't wanna go down this road. I mean, this but there are certain doctrines in the Roman Catholic church, for example, like purgatory, and some others as well that have warrant perhaps in apocryphal and deuterocanonical books, but not in the 27th.
Collin Hansen:Now my answer to that. It's fascinating. The thirty nine articles of religion, which is the Anglican confession of faith, born out of the late 16th century, is the first document to identify the 27 books of the Old Testament that we know of in our English Bibles as authoritative and canonical with the other books as, quote, deuterocanonical. When the King James Bible was first published, it included the apocryphal. Why?
Collin Hansen:I thought that was bad. I almost came down. Why? Because the 39 article said they're not canonical, they can't establish doctrine, but they're profitable, and they're worth reading, and they should be read. So it was included, but they weren't.
Collin Hansen:They're viewed on a on a lesser level. And the Council of Trent responded to the reformation in the set in the 17th in the 16th century and in early 17th century by saying no to that. No. The Apocrypha is included, and it's equally canonical. So you're right to identify the reformation as the critical juncture by which these issues were worked out.
Collin Hansen:I would just wanna say, and I'm I'm Protestant on this. I believe by confession of faith, really, that it's important for the synagogue and the church to share a common canonical deposit. That's important to me from a theological. Why? Because the Oracles of God has been entrusted to the Jews.
Collin Hansen:So that that's that to me is important that we share a common Canon and scope when it comes to the Hebrew scriptures of the old Testament. But the old testament was doing its work happily, you know, for 1600 years, 1500 years, in the life of the eastern and the western church, while some of these questions were still being debated and disagreed upon. So that's why I'm slow to identify canon. Right? The concept of canon with list, formalized list, and have it more attached to a notion of sort of authoritative scripture recognizing that within an ecumenical world, there are some debates to this day about what books are in and what books are out, and and that's something that's a kind of interesting continued Christian phenomenon.
Collin Hansen:You wanna press back on that? I I find I mean, that was we just went to the deep end of the pool. But I find the comp that question to be eminently fascinating. It's a good question.
Speaker 4:I really appreciated everything you talked about tonight, but, one
Collin Hansen:one of
Speaker 4:the points you were talking about was, and forgive me if I'm not talking about this correctly, the organic theory of the literary history of the Bible. I was wondering if you could talk about that in light of a discussion of biblical inerrancy.
Collin Hansen:Biblical inerrancy. Well, I mean, the guy who you know, BB Warfield, the the fellow who sort of framed organic an organic theory of inspiration the way in which he did, You know, he's kind of, in many ways, the theological father of inerrancy within, you know, an American context as well. How many of you are familiar with that term? Am I can I see hands? Inerrancy?
Collin Hansen:And and and okay. Highly contentious issue. It's an important issue. And I'm gonna just give you my spiel, and you can have someone else come in and give you a different spiel. Alright.
Collin Hansen:This goes back to that theory of knowledge. I would be very now what what is inerrancy? Let's clarify this for for people who are new to this thing. It's the claim that the Bible does not make any errors, factual errors. Any anything that the Bible claims is not an error.
Collin Hansen:And so that pushes the Bible into the a corner to answer all so for example, was Paul Ptolemaic in his view of the universe, or was he Copernican? Was the sun the center of the universe, or was the earth the center of the universe? And if Paul viewed it the other way, does that mean now the Bible is in error? I mean, there's all these kinds of questions have been raised. Did Jesus die on Thursday, or did Jesus die on Friday?
Collin Hansen:Did Judas die by hanging himself, or did he fall off of a cliff, or did he hang himself when the tree branch broke and he fell off a cliff? Is Samuel right about the life of David with all the warts? I mean, his, you know, sleeping with Bathsheba, killing Uriah, Absalom riding through and getting caught by the air and dying, getting run through. Is that picture right? Or is Chronicles right?
Collin Hansen:Where David is presented squeaky clean with none of those attendant familial problems that you have in the book of Samuel. Is Genesis 1 the proper creation account, or is it Genesis 2? Or do the 2 how do the 2 relate? I mean, the issues are just enormous. I mean, there's so many, and I love them all.
Collin Hansen:They're fascinating. I would just say, and I'm giving you my perspective on this. Where inerrancy works positively for me is in an understanding about my own I'm sorry, y'all. It's, my fellow little league coaches. It's true.
Collin Hansen:Where it works for me is in my understanding, of my submission of my own intellectual autonomy to the foot of the Bible. Do I place myself over the Bible, Or do I submit myself to the bible? That that to me is what is the rub of the doctrine of inerrancy. But where I would also want to warn my evangelical brothers and sisters, and I put myself on that team, talking about my family here, where I'd wanna warn us, is to be very careful not to link biblical authority to the doctrine of inerrancy. That's been a problem, I think, that you see in the seventies, eighties, and the nineties in this particular discussion in the evangelical world, again, which is my team.
Collin Hansen:I bat for that team. Alright? Why? Because the bible is authoritative because God says it is, period. That might arise with the doctrine of inerrancy, and then bolster all of that so that now the Bible can be authoritative.
Collin Hansen:No. The Bible's authority and the life of the church and by the way, I'm with Karl Barth on this. You we don't have the authority of Jesus in the life the church without the authority of the Bible. You can't have the one without the other. My Episcopal brothers and sisters could really learn from that.
Collin Hansen:Right? You can't have the one without the other. You want the authority of Jesus? Then you've got the authority of the bible, both of them. But that is a properly basic confession of faith regarding my belief about God and his word.
Collin Hansen:So I don't link authority to to to this particular issue, but and and here's the second thing. I don't have an a priori or a preconceived conception of what error is. Now this is where my reformed juices come out big time. Right? And I feel pretty strongly about that actually.
Collin Hansen:I'll go offensive on that now. I've got so in other words, if the Bible is constructing history in a certain way, and it moves the I mean, you know, here's a problem for you. I hope I'm not breaking some problems for you, but here's one for you. Did Jesus cleanse the temple a couple days before he died or at the beginning of his ministry? Synoptic gospels say he did that a couple days before he died.
Collin Hansen:John's gospel puts it right after John chapter 2. That's the beginning of his ministry. When did he do it? Well, I'm happy to say he did it twice, if that helps you sleep at night. Or we can say that narrative sequence in the bible doesn't necessitate historical chronological sequence, and and the gospel writers can move things around.
Collin Hansen:And if they're doing that, and I'm just say if, maybe they're not. But if they are, then my conception of error has to adjust in light of the bible and not my hard and fast rules being applied to the bible. I was thrown this was a big issue for me in seminary, and it's a big issue for a lot of my students. I was thrown a a raft when I was drowning on this issue from one of my own seminary profs who said very helpfully and this was by a very conservative evangelical institution. Truth does not equal precision.
Collin Hansen:That was helpful for me because I think one has to have a certain level of flexibility on some of these things to wrestle through the dynamic, but, you know, I've said enough on that. So I when when if there's an inerrancy statement, I can sign it in in good conscience. Like, I don't I don't go to bed and start sweating. I mean, I good con I can sign it. But I'd like to tell you what I mean by that.
Collin Hansen:And what I mean by that is I believe that my intellectual autonomy, is gonna be submitted to what the Bible claims. And if the Bible claims something, then it's true. But and this is a big deal to me too. But it's not always self evident what the Bible is claiming, and there can be different interpretive outcomes regarding what its claims actually are. And that's a different sort of thing, I think, that one has to keep some distinctions between things that are relatively similar.
Collin Hansen:You you wanna press back on that? Yeah. Okay.
Joel Brooks:There's a statement on biblical inerrancy, the Chicago statement of biblical inerrancy. Is that helpful, and that it does broaden that term? This is what we mean by inerrant. Like, you're allowed to round up numbers or things like that.
Collin Hansen:It just
Joel Brooks:if the number's off a little bit, well, the Bible rounds it up. It's not a error that it rounds it up.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. I mean, there are certain aspect I mean, this was a statement that was devised in the seventies, Joel, J. I. Packer, a group like that, wrestling with giving a fuller account of what we mean by inerrancy. It goes back to the the question that was asked, just just now.
Collin Hansen:And I I think it's helpful. And I I mean, a a critic of that statement could say, that's a death of an idea by a 1000000 qualifications. Now I think that's a a criticism that someone could could level. I mean, for example, and I like this about the statement. It's helpful.
Collin Hansen:When the bible says the sun is rising, that's an observational account of reality. It's not a scientific claim. So if you're gonna come at that and say the sun doesn't rise, it's a the earth on me. It's like, that's just stupid. I mean, they're gonna say that.
Collin Hansen:Of course. I mean, we we know that there are observational accounts of reality that don't necessarily correspond to how things actually are on a scientific account of things, and I think the statement can be helpful to adjudicate some of those kinds of problems. I think there are certain aspects of that statement that can be brought into critical tension with its own affirmations, and I find that an interesting project. But as a place to kinda get out of the gate to say, what does this mean, and how can it be helpful, and what are its limitations? I think the Chicago statement's a fine place.
Collin Hansen:Now you didn't ask this, and I probably shouldn't say it, but the Chicago statement on hermeneutics, which came after the fact, I don't like it. No. I just don't like it. But but as far as that one, you know, the the the the statement on interpretation makes me sweat, makes you very nervous.
Speaker 5:I'm I'm trying to think of the most complicated question I could ask you.
Collin Hansen:That's Brandon Bennett. That's right. Could you
Speaker 5:just talk about the old testament and the life
Collin Hansen:of the church? You know, it's important.
Speaker 5:Coming to a Christ centered reading of the old testament, is it just history? Is it important for us? Yeah.
Collin Hansen:You know, the first bad guy in the life of the church in the 2nd century was a heretic by the name of Marcion, and he's most remembered for the fact that he wanted to jettison the old testament. He just, you know, he came with a kind of gnostic worldview that saw the material world as inherently evil and the the pneumatic or the spiritual world as that's where true being and essence and purity is. And you get into the old testament and it's messy and earthy, and that certainly cannot be the same God that we have in the revelation in Jesus. So, you know, Marcion takes a Jeffersonian approach to the Bible and pulls out his white out and his scissors, and he cuts out anything that feels like the old testament to him. So it means think about it.
Collin Hansen:The first bad guy in the life of the church, the first heretic that forced the church to clarify its thinking on a matter, the presenting issue was the Old Testament. And so, you know, and who do you have? Tertullian? Irenaeus? Coming out with books entitled Against Marcion?
Collin Hansen:I mean, the church fathers knew how to fight. I mean, I'll say that. I mean, there's no I mean, how's that for the title of a book? You're wrong. I mean, that's gonna get busy.
Collin Hansen:And, and it's and it was very important. I mean, you there's a lot of debate among, historians of religion, or historians of the early church. When was the new testament canon formalized and stable? 2nd century? Theodore Zahn argues that.
Collin Hansen:4th century, Adolph von Harnack. Lots of debates. And you'll hear people land, you know, who talk about this say, the church operated without a canon for 2 centuries or 4 centuries depending on where you are. And there's always a magnificent, gaping hole in that discussion. And that is the church never, and I'm including the apostolic period all the way up into the 4th century, if that's the time when the New Testament canon was formalized and established and stabilized.
Collin Hansen:The church never operated without a canon. Never. Why? Because it received Israel's scriptures as a Christian witness, and this is crucial, in an unredacted form. In other words, the new testament authors, the early church writers, the apostolic fathers, they saw no need to baptize the Old Testament by sliding Jesus's name in there.
Collin Hansen:And shatter at Meshach and Abednego or tossed into the fire. Nebuchadnezzar looked in and he saw a 4th person, Jesus of Nazareth. It doesn't do that. Now Isaiah 52:13, behold my servant, comma, Jesus Christ, comma. I mean, it doesn't do it.
Collin Hansen:It allows the Old Testament in its given literary form to be a Christian witness right off of the level of its surface literal sense. It's one of the great achievements of the church. The church has never operated without the old testament as Christian scripture, and I would say this. I love the way that Hans von Kompenhausen, he's a scholar of the of the early 20th century, the way in which he framed the issue. And I think this is provocative, but he's right.
Collin Hansen:The problem in the early church was not, what do we do with the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures now that we have Jesus? It was actually quite the reverse. How do we understand Jesus in light of the assumed character and the assumed canonicity of our Hebrew scriptures? That was the instinct. And you think think about it.
Collin Hansen:I I You've got the new testament completely on your side on this. Here's Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus. Cleopas, unnamed disciple. They don't know who he is. I mean, I I maybe talked about this here before, so forgive me this is a repeat, but, I mean if there's instant replay in heaven, I wanna see this story.
Collin Hansen:It is it is funny. It's intense. I mean, Jesus said, they asked Jesus, you get this right, they asked Jesus, do you not know what happened around here? And Jesus says, what are you talking about? They crucified Jesus.
Collin Hansen:And she's like, oh, really? That was that what happened? And so they're going back and forth. And then what does Jesus do? Jesus has a bible study with them explaining to himself, to them himself on the basis of the law and the prophets, and then when he broke bread, that's enough to make it kinda sacramentalist out of some of you, right?
Collin Hansen:You got the Bible, you got the breaking of the bread. When they break the bread, they see Jesus and then Jesus is gone. And then at the end of the chapter, he comes back and what does Jesus do? He sits with his disciples and he has a bible study. And he explains to them the significance of them of himself on the basis of the law of the prophets and the Psalms, it says at the end of Luke 24.
Collin Hansen:And the Psalms, for those of you know this, the the the Hebrew Canon is broken into 3 parts. You have the law, you have the prophets, you have the writings. And in most canonical orderings, not all, but in most canonical orderings, the Psalms are the first book of that last section of the Hebrew canon called the writings. It's I'm pretty persuaded that when Jesus said that in Luke 20 4, he wasn't just talking about the Psalms. He was saying the law, the prophets, and the Psalms as the titular head of all of the writings.
Collin Hansen:In other words, all of it witnesses to me. Isn't that crazy? Jesus is having a bible study and explaining the significance of himself on the basis of the Hebrew canon. So the the the Hebrew Canon, the scriptures, the old testament, I'm sealing this from my own doctoral supervisor, but they are not the booster rockets on the space shuttle that once we've got into New Testament orbit, they can sort of fall back into the ocean and they've done their work. The old testament is a continued witness to our understanding of who God is, and in fact, it pressures us to understand God in a triune way and in a redemptive way that's shaped by the gospel.
Collin Hansen:So, I mean, you you talked touched a raider, Brandon, and I know you knew you would. But, that I mean, that that to me is the the role of the Old Testament. I feel like that's part of my vocational calling. You know, to exercise Marcion's ghost in the life of the church wherever he resides, May his ghostly posterior be kicked again and again. Right?
Speaker 6:Could you speak a little to the, daily office and lectionary and your tradition and how it plays out in the devotional life of the church?
Collin Hansen:Well, I'm not good at it. I mean, I mean, the the daily off the the lectionary you you all do lecture your continue. Alright, Joel? Like, you preach through books one chunk at a time kind of thing. In my tradition in the Anglican world, we do set readings that kind of work through a 3 year cycle.
Collin Hansen:And so, it kind of gives you a coverage of the Psalms and an Old Testament reading and a New Testament reading. And, and then the daily office, you know, you you kinda get through the bible in a year and then the Psalms, you know, you know, or or at least the bible in every 2 years and then the Psalms, you know, multiple times. You know, it depends on what day of the week you catch me. I mean, I I I think that those are great gifts to the church. I have a catholic little c sensibility in me that sees the value in that.
Collin Hansen:I recognize the danger of, of, the lack of whole council preaching when you get lost in one book for 5 years. I was in a church that did Romans for three and a half years. It was a rich experience, but I get how you can get lost in Romans and forget there's a lot of bible there. So this is my answer to that. My answer is in my tradition, if you're gonna do lectionary preaching, which I find a lot of value in that, you have to have attached to that a robust teaching life in some sort of Christian education setting.
Collin Hansen:So for example, the Advent where I am. We do lekkyo I mean, we do the lectionary, preaching. K? So it's gonna be a gospel reading. It's gonna be an epistle reading.
Collin Hansen:It's gonna be an old testament reading. But at the same time, when you go into our Sunday school hour, our dean is is teaching Lectio Continua through Acts. I'll do I just finished something through John. Another person's doing something in Romans. So you have Sunday school offerings where you're going through a sort of a sustained movement of a large book of the Bible.
Collin Hansen:I think those are both necessary to one another, and both would be attenuate or lessened, weakened, if they didn't have the influencing presence of the other. Right? So I I see the value in both, and, you know, you know the old story about Calvin. Right? Calvin gets kicked out of, out of Geneva.
Collin Hansen:They run him out of town because he gets into a conflict. I think he was preaching through Ezekiel. Might be wrong, maybe Deuteronomy, but I think he was Ezekiel. He's gone for 3 something years in Stroudsburg with boots. And then they called the city council, calls him back.
Collin Hansen:It's passed. He didn't wanna go but he calls him back. And you know what Calvin does? The next the next verse where he left off 3 years before. What?
Collin Hansen:It's like, where were we? Right? And then we move on. So I see, you know, I've got enough of that in me to see the value of lectio continuo or whole book teaching. But if you do lectionary preaching like you do in my world, you know, I think it has to be connected to the teaching office of of whole books.
Collin Hansen:I don't know if that got to your question or not, but yes, sir.
Speaker 7:So you don't know me. You don't know where this question is coming from. How I guess my question has to do with, the the knowledge that you have and how it relates to the bible and the way you read it from, you know, inspiration from God type of level. Like, you have a full knowledge of the Bible. Right?
Speaker 7:You can just say, yeah. And, I mean, you answer questions very well, but then, you know, pulled back from the you as an educator and you as your job to do to teach these sorts of things, Like, how do you how does the bible and how do you read the bible on that level?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Okay. So, gosh. I'm maybe I'm not thinking through the question well. So you wanna know how how I think about the bible like personally?
Collin Hansen:Sort of detached from the fact that I pay my mortgage by doing this? Yeah. Okay. Good question. That's a good question.
Collin Hansen:And, not one that, you can see this is too this is a personal question. Not one that I have an easy answer to because, there are difficulties involved when god is your business. Eugene Peterson, in a little essay that he wrote on seminary, he said, no one leaves seminary unscathed. And he was right. And, you know, I'm prayerful, and as I I don't wanna live in a dichotomous view of of the mind, the life of the mind, and the life of the affections.
Collin Hansen:I don't wanna see those 2 as antipodal to one another, like they can't be in unison with one another. I I I I wanna I wanna believe that when I'm parsing Hebrew verbs with students, that that is an act of worship. You know, when I'm wrestling with what in the world is Ezekiel doing in chapter 1 and having to think through that that that's not devoid of a life lived before God. You know, can I refer to Carl Barth again? Carl Barth said that the Christian theological task is prayer and labor.
Collin Hansen:Obviously, that's a pastor's task. That's a Christian's task. Prayer and labor. But I think, you know, the instinct is to think of those as compartments, like, I pray and then I labor. That's not what he meant.
Collin Hansen:He meant that all of our labor and the hard work of thinking hard after Jesus. We're talking about God. You know, it's like me is it that that's why I'm sorry to keep quoting him. That's why Barth said, you might have great lawyers and great statesmen. You might have great doctors.
Collin Hansen:I mean, I my father just had a a procedure done. Davies runs the the the heart team at UAB. Incredible what these people can do. A great doctor. Right?
Collin Hansen:But but Barth says, but you can only have little theologians. You can only have little pastors. Why? Well, because of this our subject matter, what we do what we do for a living is too big, too enormous. It's we're, I mean, Bart used to say that the angels are looking down and laughing at what old Bart's doing today.
Collin Hansen:He's laughing at him. Right? I live in that tension. I feel that. And, you know, it's sometimes it's a job.
Collin Hansen:Sometimes the affections roll in. Sometimes it's dry, sometimes the thought of reading the Bible today or teaching a class. I've literally been in my chair in my office and thought, you know, I would rather go, I don't know, do anything than go and talk to these students right now. Right. Then you go and you offer a prayer up on the way in the door and things happen.
Collin Hansen:It's There's a There are dangers in the kind of job that I have and the kind of work of ministry, And, you know, so I so I I don't know if that's answer your question, but, I don't want to. I want to believe that the life of the mind and the life of the affections do not have to be at odds with one another. That you can think hard after Jesus. He deserves it, he demands it, and you can feel hard after him. And I don't have to you know who the greatest example of that, I think, in the American theological scene is?
Collin Hansen:Jonathan Edwards. I mean, Jonathan Edwards is probably the greatest philosophical mind America has ever produced. I'm not just talking about theologian. I mean, philosophical mind. This guy was a genius.
Collin Hansen:When God was handing out brains, Jonathan Edwards went through the the line, like, 10 times. I mean, it's like, I was writing a treatise on spiders at the age of 8. I mean, it's just it's crazy. But Jonathan Edwards said, you know, we need light and heat. We need the the opening of the intellect and the mind, and we need heat of of the affections.
Collin Hansen:We need both. And he uses the great illustration of honey. He says, it's one thing to talk about honey. It's one thing to give a kind of academic account of honey, but it's another thing to stick your finger in the jar and taste it. He said, you know, Christians need both.
Collin Hansen:You need light and you need heat. I have to believe that's true. I don't always live into that faithfully, to be honest with you. I struggle with that. But I have to believe that that aspect is true.
Speaker 8:Speaking about, like, Jesus being present throughout the Old Testament, how do you temper that with, like, not, you know, seeing Jesus under every rock, like they did in the middle ages and, you know Well,
Collin Hansen:I like the middle I mean, to be honest with you, I've got a soft place in my heart for medieval exegesis. You know, so I you know, and that's a long conversation. I I think, you know, but I get your point. In other words, we don't wanna do a kind of proof texting approach to the bible where we're finding Jesus under rocks and trees. How does the whole of the old testament canon witness to the reality of Jesus?
Collin Hansen:The best answer that I can get to you again, we want methods, but I think I I'm learning to talk more in terms of instincts than methods now. I teach, so I've gotta give some kind of method, but it's instinct. Cyril of Alexandria, 4th century theologian, great theologian, and an allegrist, like, a medieval kind of reader. Right? I mean, Cyril said in his preface of the commentary on Jonah, and I love the way he framed this because I think he's spot on.
Collin Hansen:He said, reading the Old Testament through a Christian Trinitarian lens is like a bee that flies through a meadow and knows what flower to land on and what flower not to land on. That flower will yield honey, that one won't. And that's an act of discernment that I think grows with time, probably reading the bible in light and in conversation with the best of the Christian interpretive tradition. I mean, I'll give you an example of this. I'm sorry I've mentioned Barth so much, because I'm really not a Barthian.
Collin Hansen:I'm quite critical of him on some significant matters, but I'm I'm gonna say his name one more time. Barth says, do you wanna know how the Old Testament one angle in which the Old Testament witnesses to Jesus answer? The whole history of Israel. And it was not just a text here, here, here. Psalm 22 verse 1, Psalm 2 verse 8, Psalm 110, Jeremiah 33 verse 21, Micah 5 chapter 2.
Collin Hansen:We got all of our texts. He's like, all those are fine. But the whole history of Israel in its election and its rejection is a witness to the reality of Jesus Christ. That begins to get into a textured whole cloth reading rather than, you know, here he is. A kinda where is Waldo approach.
Collin Hansen:Is he there? Is he there? Is he there? Because I think, you know, one gets into a lot of dangers with that.
Joel Brooks:Thank you, Mark. Since we are meeting again tomorrow night or another group is coming in, if you wanna come back, you're welcome to. We don't have to fold up chairs or anything. You chose the right night. We don't have to take them down to trucks in the pouring rain, which we've had to in all the years past.
Joel Brooks:So just leave everything here. Just throw stuff away. And, how about I will close us in prayer. Father, we thank you for our time together. We pray that through your spirit, you would write your truths onto our hearts, and that we would see Jesus more clearly and that you would stir our hearts and affection towards him.
Joel Brooks:Bless us as we go. We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.